um, which way does the timer count?

In all of my excitement about being in the city (yay!), and having Kathryn here (yay!) and pretending it was a sleepover (yay!), and knowing I needed to get to the pool early enough to avoid the traffic (boo) and the classes in the pool (boo), I forgot to bring a workout with me (boo)--so I tried to remember the one that I did part of last night. Here's what I did.

Warm-up (400): 100FR, 100 kick, 100 pull, 100IM
Easy/ fast or die (500): 4x [25 easy, 25 fast, 25 easy, 50 fast; the term "fast" being used lightly, and the term "easy" used mainly to describe one-armed fly], IM order
Endurance (1200): 6x200FR on 4 minutes*
Cool-down (300): 50FR pull/50BK pull, 50FR kick/50BK kick, 25FR/25BK/25BR/25FR
===2400m, in 1hour 5min.

*I thought I was being all techy-fancy on the 200s, and set the timer function on my watch at 4 minutes, and to repeat at the end of each 4 minutes--that way, I'd know to start swimming again at the beeps, and not have to deal with any calculations or finding a pace clock. I got antsy halfway through my first 200 and thought I'd check where I was at, you know, just to see. So I looked at my watch at saw "2:13," and thought, crap, I'm way behind, I'm never going to make 4 minutes! My next thought: I must have made a mistake last night when I was timing my 200. And right after that: how do I explain this to Julie, that I can't make 4:00 on my 200! So I finished the 200 and looked at my watch, which read :23. Uh-duh. It counts down from 4, not up. So I made my pace. For the record, it did get harder throughout the 200s. By the 6th one, I was down to :13 left. And if I wasn't on a 4:00 pace, I would have easily taken another 10 seconds rest between each one. Easily.

Okay, now here is what I was supposed to do: september 15th workout. I was close!